


In The Hands of Evil

by MirrorMystic



Category: Samurai Jack (Cartoon)
Genre: Abusive Parents, Action, Angst, Gen, Season 5 Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-22
Updated: 2017-03-22
Packaged: 2018-10-09 08:48:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,118
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10408392
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MirrorMystic/pseuds/MirrorMystic
Summary: (Contains spoilers for the first two episodes of Season 5.)First, they were many. Now, they are one.Ashi returns to the temple where she was born, with a stolen sword and a heart full of grief. She doesn't quite get the welcome that she wants- but she might finally get the chance she deserves.





	

~*~  
  
On that day, the assassin, Ashi, returned to the temple of her birth, a priceless gift in her hands.  
  
She paused at the base of the mountain, lifting her face to the night sky. The neon lights of Aku’s dominion blotted out the stars, but the silver disk of the moon still shone through, glinting off her porcelain mask.  
  
Pennants flapped in the breeze, marking the trail up to the temple. She reached up and grabbed a fistful of the waving flag, tearing it from its post. She wrapped the ragged cloth around her thigh and cinched it tight. Within moments, it grew dark and sticky with blood.  
  
Ashi drew a rasping breath. Then, she clutched the offering to her chest, and limped her way up the mountain.  
  
~*~  
  
The temple was dominated by the enormous carved idol of the Master, Lord Aku, its great shadow looming over all who entered. The high priestess knelt in supplication to her overlord. In times past, there were others- the Sisterhood’s halls swelled with members, and the temple would echo with their voices raised in worship.  
  
Now, they were dead, sacrifices to complete the training of her daughters- her assassins- whose mission would bring them more favor from Lord Aku than any whisper of prayer ever could.  
  
First, they were many. Now, they are one.  
  
A shadow appeared on the ledge, stepped into the firelight, and became a woman.  
  
Ashi got to her knees and bowed low.  
  
“Mother,” she began.  
  
“Report,” the high priestess snapped.  
  
“We…” Ashi grimaced, though her mask showed nothing. “We are defeated, Mother. The samurai… he was beyond us.”  
  
The matriarch was just a silhouette in the flickering firelight. She rose, but did not turn, didn’t even speak. A dreadful quiet settled between them.  
  
“Aya was the first to fall,” Ashi continued, when the silence became unbearable. “She was the youngest of us, and she was the first-”  
  
“What of the samurai?”  
  
The coldness of her mother’s voice gave Ashi pause. She swallowed.  
  
“...Gone. We lost him.”  
  
Icy silence settled over them like frost on the grass. The matriarch turned. Her mask looked down at her with its unchanging scowl.  
  
“B-But I’ve brought a gift,” Ashi said, laying the offering out in her arms. The matriarch reached down and plucked it out of her grasp, holding it up to the firelight.  
  
“I could not take the samurai’s life,” Ashi said, “so I took his sword.”  
  
Her mother examined the sword, barely sparing her a second glance. She drew the blade, and it sang as it left its scabbard, shining as if with its own inner light. A breeze passed through the temple and guttered the torches. Shadows scattered across the floor, as if fleeing from the holy sword. Lord Aku, even in effigy, seemed to hiss in fear at the sight, wind whistling through the temple walls.  
  
A sword, forged by the gods. The only thing that could do Lord Aku harm. It was a mighty weapon, and Ashi was proud to have claimed it from the samurai. If her sisters had been with her, they would have managed more than just disarming him. They had been so close. Together, they had a chance. But alone…  
  
Ashi flinched at the memory. Her team. Her sisters.  
  
_First, they were many. Now, they are one._  
  
“Is this all?”  
  
Her mother’s voice snapped her back to the present.  
  
“What?”  
  
“Is this all?” She repeated, voice dripping with scorn.  
  
“How can you say that?” Ashi snapped, unable to bite back the outburst. “My sisters died! Your _daughters_ died!”  
  
“My daughters _failed_!” The matriarch shouted her down. “Seven of you! Raised to be killers from the moment you could walk! Raised for this one goal, this one purpose! Seven of you, sent into the wilderness! Seven assassins! _Seven_ ** _failures_**!”  
  
There was a crack. Ashi reeled back, her jaw stinging beneath the mask.  
  
The priestess tossed aside the empty scabbard, conjuring her horned staff to her hand in a wisp of smoke. She loomed over Ashi, her staff in one hand, the samurai’s stolen sword in another.  
  
Ashi stared at her, stunned.  
  
“Mother, I-”  
  
The horned staff smashed her across the face and sent her sprawling, cracking her mask down the middle. It fell from her face and shattered on the floor.  
  
“Seven daughters,” the matriarch stalked towards her, robes trailing across the ground, “seven assassins I sent into this world, and all but _one_ of them has the strength to die doing her duty! But you! You come crawling back to me with nothing but a _sword_ to show for it!”  
  
The staff swung again in a wide, sweeping arc. Ashi leapt over the blow- only for the sword to catch her in the side. She gasped as it bit into her bodysuit, then spun away from the blow. She landed on her feet, a gash above her hip. She cringed, before darting away, trying to get some distance.  
  
“He should have killed you, Ashi!” The matriarch growled, stalking after her, relentless. “You should have died fighting! You should have given your life for the cause!”  
  
Ashi ducked behind a wall. Her mother appeared in a curl of smoke. Ashi dropped. The sword flashed above her head. The staff cracked her in the stomach.  
  
She rolled across the floor, breath coming in pained gasps. She rose. The sword flashed past her nose, again. She spun, the staff thrusting past the small of her back, curling into the blow. Her elbow smashed into her mother’s sternum and she reeled back, choking.  
  
Ashi stared at her own raised fists in shock. Her mother’s mask glowered at her.  
  
“You-” She coughed. “You would strike your own mother?”  
  
Ashi swallowed. “Mother, I-”  
  
Ashi cried out as the horned staff stabbed into her stomach, speared like a bale of hay.  
  
“ _Petulant_ ** _child_** _!_ ” The matriarch shrieked, and swung.  
  
Ashi flew across the room. She smashed into the corner post of the gong that had announced her birth. The wood splintered under her weight. Ashi tumbled to the ground, the gong falling beside her in a final, dissonant crash.  
  
She pressed a hand to her stomach. There were four bloody holes in her bodysuit, in the pattern of the staff’s headpiece- the pattern of Lord Aku’s horns.  
  
Ashi got to her feet, but her bandaged thigh protested. Her mother slammed the staff into her leg, sweeping Ashi to the ground. The sword came flashing down.  
  
Ashi crossed her arms above her and caught the blade, cringing as the sword sawed through her bracers and cut into her wrists. Her mother swiped the blade aside, and then plunged her staff into Ashi’s neck.  
  
The staff’s horns locked around Ashi’s throat and pinned her to the ground. She gasped and choked, her hands clawing uselessly at the prongs. She stared at her mother, tears in her eyes.  
  
“You should have known,” the matriarch said, raising the samurai’s sword in both hands. “You should have known, my daughter! One way or another, _this sword would be your death!_ ”  
  
Silver split the air, and the sword cleaved Ashi from shoulder to hip-  
  
But she did not die.  
  
A shockwave shook the room. The blast threw the matriarch back against the wall, the samurai’s sword clattering from her fingers, ringing like a struck bell. The blast also knocked the staff away, freeing Ashi’s throat from its embrace. A bloody line traced a slash from the top of her left shoulder, across her chest and down to her hip. Silver gleamed in the air.  
  
In the instant the sword had met her flesh, a life had flickered before Ashi’s eyes. Not her life, but that of a man- a father, watching an unspeakable evil destroy his home. A father, sending his wife away with his son, his sword, and the last shreds of his hope. A father, old and gray, dressed in rags, beholding his son- a hero, garbed in purest white.  
  
Ashi clutched her heart, feeling blood well up along the line across her chest. The wound was painful- but only skin deep.  
  
_This sword was forged in purity and strength,_ a voice said, carried on the echo of the sword’s ringing chime. _In the hands of evil, it could never harm an innocent._ _  
__  
_ A memory flashed across Ashi’s eyes, this time one of her own: Her sisters, fighting a battle they could not hope to win. A shaft of light, breaking her focus. She followed the light, caught a glimpse of the world outside, the beauty and promise it held. Then her mother had torn her away from that light, that life, and thrown her to her trainer for a beating.  
  
_Teach this one a lesson_ , her mother had said.  
  
And only now, on the brink of death, did Ashi feel like she’d finally learned.  
  
Across the room, her mother was clutching her wrist, the sword’s resonance rattling her bones. She shrank away from her, gaze flicking between Ashi and the samurai’s stolen sword as if they were both cursed.  
  
“...That’s… impossible…” The matriarch snarled.  
  
Then, as if mocking the very notion of ‘impossibility’, a sword fell from the ceiling.  
  
It planted itself tip-down in the floor, its hilt wrapped in crimson. Ashi knew it at once.  
  
Aya’s sword. Her little sister. The youngest of them, and the first to fall.  
  
Ashi rose to her feet, anger fueling her weary limbs. She remembered chasing the samurai through the mausoleum, and finding her body in his wake. She remembered the line drawn across her throat, even as the air filled with a dreadful ringing. She remembered Aya’s face, beautiful even in death.  
  
Ashi grit her teeth, taking Aya’s sword in her hands.  
  
“So be it,” the matriarch said, conjuring her staff back to her grasp. “Perhaps it is your destiny to die a slower death- a death by inches. Perhaps then you will learn the cost of failure.”  
  
Ashi glared at her, gripping Aya’s sword until her knuckles went white.  
  
Aya was dead. The samurai killed her, because she had been sent to kill him.  
  
Who was it, then, who sent them out to die?  
  
Ashi charged. She scooped up the samurai’s fallen sword, and the blades danced in her hands, flashing like silver lightning.  
  
The matriarch spun her staff, warding away the blows with her superior reach. Each strike, each deflection, rang out like chimes. But slowly but surely, she was being pushed back.  
  
The matriarch bumped into the wall behind her and realized Ashi had backed her against the balcony door. Ashi struck, taking advantage of the moment’s distraction. The samurai’s sword came flashing down.  
  
The matriarch caught the blade in the horns of her staff, wrenching Ashi’s arm around and following through with the haft. She cracked Ashi across the jaw, but Ashi spun with the blow, carrying the momentum into a spinning kick.  
  
She slammed back into the doors as the samurai’s sword fell from Ashi’s grip and clattered across the stone floor. Ashi spun again, kicking her in the face. She crashed through the doors and out onto the balcony, a crack forming down the center of her mask.  
  
Ashi curled both her hands around the red grip of Aya’s sword, putting both arms into every swing. Each strike clashed and rang out like thunder, each hammer-blow shivering up the metal of the matriarch’s staff and rattling up into her bones.  
  
Finally, screaming out in righteous anger, Ashi made her mark. She cleaved through her mother’s staff in a single, sweeping swing, the air ringing with the shriek of metal. Then, still carried around by the force of her blow, she spun and stamped her heel through her mother’s sternum. The matriarch gave a strangled cry and crashed over the railing, her fingers scrabbling for the edge. The broken ends of her staff tumbled down past her, into the fog.    
  
Ashi drew in a ragged gasp, stepping up to the ledge, looming above her mother.  
  
Years ago, they’d been in a situation just like this. Ashi grit her teeth, feeling the memory of her mother grinding her staff into her fingers as she clung to a ledge. The pain flickered across her knuckles, ghostlike.  
  
“Are you weak, Mother?” Ashi asked, echoing that day, so long ago.  
  
The matriarch flexed her fingers, struggling to find purchase in the rock face. She glowered up at Ashi, her mask expressionless as always.  
  
“No, Ashi,” she said, a dagger flicking out of her sleeve. “I’m not like _you_.”  
  
A flash. A curl of smoke. The sing of a blade. Ashi flipped Aya’s sword in her hands, put her thumb behind the hilt, and stabbed behind her. The blade vanished into the matriarch’s robes. Ashi curled into the blow, spinning around to face her. She caught the knife as it fell from her mother’s twitching fingers, and buried it in her mother’s throat.  
  
“You’re right, Mother,” Ashi spat, as the priestess slumped in her arms. “I’m _nothing_ like you.”  
  
Ashi left the dagger where it was and curled both hands around the red hilt of Aya’s sword. She wrenched the blade aside, and her mother toppled over the railing and into the abyss.  
  
Ashi watched her fall, feeling nothing. Then exhaustion finally caught up to her, and she limped and stumbled back inside.  
  
The samurai was waiting for her.  
  
He was standing in the ruined temple, gazing up at the wooden effigy of Lord Aku, his face unreadable. His sword, reclaimed, hung in its scabbard from his belt.  
  
“Samurai,” Ashi said, unsteady on her feet. “You came for me.”  
  
His hand rested on the hilt of his sword. He met her eyes.  
  
“No,” he said. And then he turned away.  
  
“Take it, then,” Ashi called out after him. “It didn’t belong to me. And this doesn’t belong to you.”  
  
Ashi could scarcely stand, much less walk. She fell to her knees, leaning on Aya’s sword. In the flickering torchlight, the shadows formed the Sisterhood- her mother, her trainers. Her sisters. But they were just shadows. Ghosts in the firelight.  
  
First, they were many. Now, they are one.  
  
“Finish it,” Ashi rasped. The samurai stopped in his tracks.  
  
“ _Finish it!_ ” She screamed. “You’ve won, samurai. Your training was superior! From the moment we could walk, we were trained to kill you, but it wasn’t enough! Now finish it, samurai! You killed my sisters! Now _kill me!_ ”  
  
Something scraped across the stone floor. Ashi lifted it to the light, drawing it out of its sheath. A dagger, with a purple tassel.  
  
“An honorable death…?” Ashi whispered. She shut her eyes, blinking away tears. “...Very well.”  
  
The dagger opened into a forked blade. She pressed it to her stomach, the twin points digging into her skin, so sharp they were already drawing blood. Two more wounds, to match the four from earlier.  
  
“Sisters,” Ashi said through silent tears, “wait for me.”  
  
Her palm closed around the dagger’s hilt-  
  
“Shinobi,” the samurai said.  
  
Ashi stopped. She looked up at him.  
  
“What were their names?”  
  
Ashi exhaled. The warmth in his voice pulled her back, gave her pause. She reached beside her, to where Aya’s sword was planted tip-first in the ground. She pulled herself to her feet and began to walk- not to the samurai, but to the stone pedestal that the carved idol of Lord Aku used as a throne. She turned to the samurai, still holding the forked dagger, holding Aya’s sword towards him.  
  
“This sword belonged to Aya,” Ashi said. “My little sister. She was the youngest of us. She was the first to fall.”  
  
The samurai nodded, somber. Ashi struck the forked dagger against the stone. A metallic ringing whined through the air.  
  
“Akari,” Ashi said, and struck the stone again. The ringing grew in intensity.  
  
“Ayumi.” Again.  
  
“Amane.” Again.  
  
“Anzu.” Again.  
  
“Airi.” Again.  
  
The temple was resonating so strongly that it was beginning to crumble. Cracks spiraled across the stone floor, torches guttered and went out, plaster and chipped stone rained down from the ceiling.  
  
On the day they were born, seven bells marked their birth. Seven strikes of the gong. Now, years later, six bells marked their passing. Six chimes of a forked dagger at the foot of a false god.  
  
Ashi stared at her reflection, split in two by the dagger in her hands. The air shivered around her.  
  
“And you, shinobi?” The samurai asked.  
  
Their eyes met in the dark.  
  
"Ashi," she said.  
  
The temple exploded.  
  
Resonant frequencies tore the temple apart and crumbled its very foundation out from beneath it. It sank away from the side of the mountain, collapsing into smoke and dust, falling into the fog and the dark as the sun began to rise. A pale white sun, peeking over a horizon clouded with smog and the dust of debris.  
  
Ashi hung from a rocky ledge, the strength fading from her fingertips. She was hurt, and she was exhausted. For a moment, she thought about just letting go.  
  
Then she took his hand, the samurai hauled her up onto the cliff, and they watched Ashi’s past vanish below them into the morning fog.  
  
~*~  
  
“Take me with you,” she’d said, at the base of the mountain. “Teach me.”  
  
Framed in the morning light, a halo around his head, he looked like something out of myth and legend. But then he stepped into the shade of a tree, and became just a man.  
  
“You are already a master of the sword,” he had replied. “What more could I teach you?”  
  
But when he made his way into the wilderness and she silently fell in step beside him, he didn’t send her away.  
  
~*~  
  
_The Sisterhood is ended. Now she follows in his shadow._ _  
__  
__She wears a robe now, like the one he once wore, only hers is a stormy gray. The fold of her robe traces a scar from shoulder to hip, a scar from when the samurai’s sword failed to kill her, and instead, opened her heart._ _  
__  
__She carries her little sister’s sword, with its red hilt, tucked into her sash._ _  
__  
__There are six scars on her stomach. Four from the horned staff when her mother tried to kill her. Two from the forked dagger when she almost did the same._ _  
__  
__She raises memorials at every campsite, six stones in an arrowhead, with an empty space for her in the lead. They are fragile things. Fleeting things. They aren’t meant to last more than a night._ _  
__  
__The samurai lights incense, claps his hands together and prays, but she doesn’t know his gods. Doesn’t understand his grief. His compassion._ _  
__  
__She carries her sisters with her. In her skin, and in her hands._ _  
__  
__First, they were many. Now, they are one._ _  
_  
~*~

**Author's Note:**

> Because Ashi deserves better than an abusive mother and an unfeeling idol of Aku. Unfortunately, with how Season 5's going, I don't think Ashi becoming Jack's protege will actually come true- but one can dream, right? I hope you all enjoyed the read.


End file.
